“Striving is leaning emotionally into a goal, a target- yearning for it, feeling pressured by your lack of it- tearing around like a chicken , with its head cut off, trying to get it. That’s striving.

Working is moving relentlessly toward your target, one step at a time, in an organized and disciplined way.”

The book notes that there are three reasons why we struggle and why struggling is not the same as effort. Struggle is not an honorable thing. And the two reasons for it are

1) The goal you are trying to reach isn’t coming fast enough.

2) Your actions are incorrect (wrong strategy).

3) Frustration from having placed a goal into a particular time frame, only to find that life has denied you.

Realizing the fact that I’ve been suffering many of the same symptoms, I need to set a rather medium term goal and have a well-defined method. I’ve been testing way too many offers and I continue to do so in the hopes that one of them might take off. I was consistently making $200-250 a day until this week and it is really depressing to see it all go back to square one again.

So my medium term goal is to make $500 a day consistenly by the end of December 2009.

Further, I’m now gonna take a very clearly defined approach as to which offers I work on and when I test new offers. I think the following will work best for me:

• Focus on ONE offer at a time (if offer is offered in multiple countries, then just one country at a time.)

• Only move onto another country/offer once that particular one is consistently making $100 a day profit.

• Work for a maximum of four hours a day (yeah right like I’m gonna be able to do this one, but I’ll try.)

If anyone has any other tips on how to scale a profitable campaign or perhaps their own specific method on when/how to approach testing new offers, feel free to post them in the comments .

Right before ASE 09, my AM progress really started to pick up. I’d been in the “dead zone” or “dip” for about six months. Nothing I tried was working and I threw a whole lot of crap at the wall just to see if something would stick.

Fortunately, things are going okay now and only going to get better. I’m now chipping away at my $10,000 worth of PPC debt from failed attempts and stupid mistakes. In fact, I’ve already paid off one of my credit cards just by using what little credit I had left on it (less than $100) by continually re-investing it into profitable campaigns.

Here’s a recap of spend and revenues for Aug. 2009 so far:

Revenue: $4620.23

Spend: $3104.54

Profit: $1515.69

Add SEO/ old clickbank articles: $395

So around $$1900 for the month. Much better than scraping for nickels and dimes in my room to buy a meal from the dollar menu a few months ago (seriously, it was that bad).

Keep in mind this spend involved a lot of testing during the beginning of the month so most of it resulted in a loss. But I will post another one of these probably two weeks into September. I expect it to be a lot better. This is the first time I’ve ever really posted revenue/spend numbers and it’s kind of gut wrenching to put it out in the open, but I think it’s going to help me bring in bigger numbers in the future because there’s no way I’m satisfied with just that. Grateful yes, satisfied no.

I’m really starting to focus on what I’m good at now. Just because everyone is pushing rebills, doesn’t mean you should too. There are a whole lot of offers out there that can potentially make you money and it’s all about just finding that somewhat hidden offer that not a lot of people are going after and killing it.

This marks a new turning point in my AM journey. I went from easily making $100+ days when I started to losing a lot of money and now back doing bigger numbers than I started off with. It’s so weird now – I was in the garage and saw my old burnt out laptop sitting there with sticky notes on it with a big $250 a day written on it. It feels good to reach your goals, but it also makes you want to work harder. I definitely am aiming to see consistent $500 a day profit days by the end of September (hopefully by next week) and most certainly $1000 by December 31st, 2009.

If there’s going to be a rags-to-riches affiliate story in 2009, it’s going to be me .

Now the title of this post might be corny, but here’s the thing.

I’ve noticed that I’ve been so hell bent on focusing on failure and embracing failing so much, that I’ve completely been short sighting myself because what I should be focusing on is success.

It’s important to know that you need to fail in order to learn, but when that becomes your sole train of thought it’s no good.

I need to move away from the notion of failing to succeed because I’m comfortable with it now after facing it every single day over the past year and a half. In fact, I think I’ve always been able to embrace failure and perhaps a little too much.

That’s why from today on I’m going to try and post about various challenges and the success I’m having along with them.

The first success of my 60 days of success is choosing to go healthy. I’ve been eating a whole lot of unhealthy fast food and staying on the computer for hours on a day without hitting the gym is doing a lot of damage to my health.

That’s why I’ve decided to try out the V Diet (Lite version). The main reason I’m doing this is not because I want a quick and easy way to gain muscle/lose fat, but rather to get used to and hopefully actually start liking healthy food.
The diet consists of replacing breakfast and dinner with protein shakes essentially. Along with this, I’ll be following a regimen of in house exercises as I’m not quit ready to hit the gym yet (I think the reason I hate the gym is because I hate working out in front of people esp as a noob).

Anyhow, I’ll be starting tomorrow (hopefully) and will let everyone know how it goes. I would post pics of my progress in getting rid of this beer belly gut of mine, but I’d rather not show up on some of those acai flogs you guys have been pushing
Oh and I just felt like putting up that picture of Captain America haha probably because  he has abs of steel.